[The Squirrel Mafia]

How do I export raw? Or you mean tiff for example? I think when I tried opening that tiff in lightroom i felt like I'm not getting the full DR of the exposure/sensor, but I guess I'm not doing something right.
I'm hit and miss so far with RT, I loved it for few images, but for few others (especially with high contrast recorded) I also found highlight/shadow settings to be more complicated than in LR. I'm far passed the +100/-100 stage of processing, but I do pull the shadows sometimes a little bit, and it feels that LR does a better job with it (at least in my limited experience). I'm fascinated by RT though, it looks so scientific

Yes. Exporting a TIFF file.

RawTherapee is a bit more complicated than most other commercial applications. Darktable on Linux & Mac is also complicated. Capture One is about as complicated as RawTherapee too, but there are many user tutorials for it. This is where Lightroom & DxO win. They are a bit more easier to use. RawTherapee doesn't really have any kind of automation to make images look better. The user will eventually arrive to something that pleases them during post processing. It takes a bit of a learning curve to get the hang of RawTherapee, but once you do, it can be quite fascinating.

To make matters worse, or better depending on how you look at it, the next version of RawTherapee will have some more features. I've been playing with some new settings in the Wavelets tab. I don't know if those will be included in the upcoming version, but they will add more complexity or adjustment options. Hahaha!

[awscreo]

Yes. Exporting a TIFF file.

RawTherapee is a bit more complicated than most other commercial applications. Darktable on Linux & Mac is also complicated. Capture One is about as complicated as RawTherapee too, but there are many user tutorials for it. This is where Lightroom & DxO win. They are a bit more easier to use. RawTherapee doesn't really have any kind of automation to make images look better. The user will eventually arrive to something that pleases them during post processing. It takes a bit of a learning curve to get the hang of RawTherapee, but once you do, it can be quite fascinating.

To make matters worse, or better depending on how you look at it, the next version of RawTherapee will have some more features. I've been playing with some new settings in the Wavelets tab. I don't know if those will be included in the upcoming version, but they will add more complexity or adjustment options. Hahaha!

Would exporting tiffs reduce some of the DR? It felt like that to me, but I'm not certain. I like RT, but every time I use it it's like the image in the attachment while using LR (after good few years using it, plus even more experience with PS, AI and other Adobe packages) is like cruising in Prius

[Trickortreat]

Exporting to tiff reduces DR. When exporting to TIFF programs code in their tone curve (RT doesnt if you start with normal preset but it employs some other things).

[timautin]

You will never recover overburned highlights, just let them clip

Yeah, I know that, but the picture is not overburned, and ACR is able to recover it.

I'd like to take a whack your photo but i doubt that my hardware could handle it
Having trouble with 20MP files as it is

Yeah the K1 files are quite demanding. My MacBook Air does the job, slowly, but it works!

the only raw processor that handles highlight recovery in a less manageable (and successful) way is Silkypix

I think Silkypix / PDCU could be a study case in design schools to provide a concrete example of what should not be done ^^.

I have come to a point where I have started to underexpose shots that will result in clipping. I found that it is much possible and less time consuming to recover details from a pitch dark looking pixel than taming a burnt pixel. Does anyone here feel the same way?

Yes I also underexpose in order to recover in post, as underexposed areas are a lot easier to recover.

Thing is - people think that they can recover blown highlights. You cant. If you blow out your higlights you have no data to work with. There is no colour information for those regions of your file. Highlight recovery is a tool that works when you dial up yoi ev compensation and want to pull your existing highlights in a more appropriate luminance range. Blown highlights have no data and best programs can do is aproximating. Some do it better than others but at the end of the day you just get wrong colour blotches.

I know that, and as I said, the picture is definitely not burnt.

There are different "methods" for highlight recovery in RT with the "Highlight Reconstruction" options, with "blend" being most often the best choice, but sometimes the wrong choice. "Color propagation" sometimes works amazingly well. Then there are "Highlight Compression" sliders in the exposure section, and the Highlights slider further down in the Shadows/Highlights section... It's definitely not a one slider fits all situation. The highlights options in RT can definitely be overused and result in various undesireable outcomes fme, especially as different tools in RT are brought into use too. I usually use a combination of the tools mentioned and not aggressively.

I find the highlight recovery of Rawtherapee to be great. Push it to far and you get artifacts though, which is expected.

Under the Exposure tab use the Exposure module and dial back the exposure a bit. I find it better to lift the image using other tools if required. Then click the Highlights recovery toolbox and select color propagation. I find color propagation works for most images but it can result in strange effects if pushed to far. Then pull the Highlight compression until satisfied.

Color propagation highlight recovery is almost magic.

Thanks, that's more or less what I tried. Still, ACR does a lot better job (better result, and a so easy to use!)

Better? If so I just ran it through PS in the usual way like any other file

Yes better, but I'd like to be able to get that in RT directly.

I'm going to guess that your RawTherapee is set to the Default processing profile. Try using the Neutral processing profile. If all you're going to do is open & convert a pixel shifted image, then the Neutral processing profile will leave it as it was caught on the sensor with no adjustments whatsoever. Then you go to the Raw tab, set the Demosaicing setting to Pixel Shift, do other correction settings if necessary, & export the image. After that, you can use ACR to process your image

As others said, when you do that, you say bye bye to the awesome dynamic range of the K1, quite a shame... A solution could be to export several tiffs at different exposure compensations to create a "fake HDR", in order to preserve some of the dynamic, but it's very time consuming!

So to sum up, seems we have to live with that, and hope that Adobe implements motion correction in Lightroom / ACR (which is not planned at the moment, from what I red a while ago). RT does a better job in pixel shift than ACR (not a lot, but a bit), it's really a shame that the highlight recovering doesn't match ACR's :/

Thanks anyway for your answers ! You deserved a nice sunset (K1, pixel shifted HDR post-processed in ACR. You can see some artefacts in the bottom right, but that's a lot better than what I get by exporting each shot to a tiff before creating the HDR) :

[todd]

. I've been playing with some new settings in the Wavelets tab.

Yeah I've been playing with those too and am impressed. Wavelet tools are the bomb.

You deserved a nice sunset

very nice indeed! I've suggested this in a couple similar posts in the past, and wasn't taken up, but it would be a great learning opportunity for anyone interested if someone were to share a DNG (in this case one with difficult but not impossible highlights) that we could each process and share our best results, making sure to note used softwares and applicable settings.